Retelling Practice

Since we have been working as a class on retelling the stories we read, we thought we would do some small group work to practice.  Everyone worked in groups of two or three to read a  story and then fill out a retelling organizer.  We read some great new books and did an excellent job working together to tell the important parts!

Valentine's Poems

Our class sure has a lot to say about our wonderful and loving families!  Just in time for Valentine's Day, we learned how to write acrostic poems.  Everyone was to use the word family to create a descriptive poem.  Each and every poem taught us something new about the families in room 119.  To accompany the outstanding poems, there is a personally drawn portrait of each family.

100th Day of School

Today was our 100th day of second grade!  We did not celebrate as much as we did back in kindergarten or first grade but we still did a fun activity.  Everyone had to imagine themselves on their 100th birthday!  Take a look...

Take a look at L.H.'s beautiful grey hair!

J.M. has grown a beard and has a cane!

S.K. will still have her pretty smile, just with a silver bun!

Retelling Strategy

The newest strategy we have been focusing on is retelling.  It can be very difficult to replay a story back to someone.  The better we can retell a story, the better our comprehension is.  We have learned a catchy way to hit the main points of any fictional story we read:

somebody -- wanted -- but -- so -- then -- after that -- finally -- in the end

We first started this practicing this strategy with the book, Grandpa's Teeth.  It was a comical book about a grandpa who loses his false teeth and has the whole town torn apart searching for them.  We worked together to slowly piece back each main part of the story.  A few days later, we read Chicken Big (possibly our new favorite) to further practice retelling.  This was another comedy but was about a large chick who does not quite fit in with the other chickens.  Throughout the book the chickens try to decide what exactly the chick is.  We just LOVED it!  It was a little easier to fill in the blanks of our organizer this time around.  We will continue to practice this strategy over the next week!

Cinderella vs. Cindy Ellen!

We have become experts when it comes to comparing and contrasting.  We learned that comparing is when we look for details that are alike about two objects and contrasting is when we find differences.  To begin this strategy, we worked with a partner to compare and contrast ourselves!  We learned many things about our classmates we did not know before.  Then, we read two books with opinion writing by Karen Kaufman Orloff: I Wanna Iguana and I Wanna New Room.  We worked as a class to find the similarities and differences about the books and put it on chart paper.  Finally, we read a well-known fairy tale, Cinderella, and compared it to Cindy Ellen, a Cinderella story with a twist.  It was a lot of fun reading the country western Cinderella and we hope to find more altered fairy tales!

We're back!

Since returning from winter break, things have been quite busy!  In between the many cold weather/snow days, we have been learning lots of new things and working hard!  Here is a little recap of our big ideas...

Reading

Comprehension is something we are all working on right now.  Sometimes it can be a little difficult for us to retell what happened in the story.  Every guided reading group is focusing on this, whether it be comprehension packets or responses in our notebooks. 

Fundations
Long vowels, especially vowel-consonant-'e', have been our new specialty!  We are learning how to spell many words that have long vowel sounds.  There have been a lot of new patterns, but we are doing a great job tapping words out and taking our time.  We are even surprising ourselves with the big words we can spell!   

Writing
Opinion writing is something we are reading and practicing how to do.  We read The Perfect Pet, I Wanna Iguana and I Wanna New Room to hear and see what opinion writing is.  They really helped us to write some of our own opinion pieces.  We even were able to go to the computer lab to type two of them!

Math
Shapes, shapes, and shapes have been the big idea in math!  We learned names of 2-D and 3-D shapes as well as their sides/faces,vertices, and angles.  It was fun exploring the different shapes and finding examples in our everyday lives.  We are moving onto 2-digit addition and 2-digit subtraction.  We will keep you posted at the different strategies we learn to solve these problems!